Call for street perfomers & musicians and creative practioners

David Graeber Institute (DGI) and LEAPLab (University of Cambridge)

Playground for Remaking Worlds
A carnival celebrating the life, work and ideas of David Graeber
20 September 2025 | Rowley Way Estate, London
1 p.m. to 8 p.m. (TBC)

Do you dream of alternative futures, lost commons, or weird utopias? Join us to transform Rowley Way, London into a playground of radical possibility! We’re celebrating the work and ideas of Radical Optimist David Graeber (1961-2020).

Think collective joy and anarchic dreaming and anything else that invites collective imagination and exchange. Bring the unexpected, the futuristic, the fun! Graeber believed the world could be utterly different-so let’s get to work (or play) imagining how.

We’re currently looking for:

Street Performers

Musicians, storytellers, artists, speculative folklorists, and movement practitioners who channel the spirit of alternative futures.

• We’re seeking Earth-rooted, speculative performers whose work aligns with Graeber’s themes: freedom, community, imagination, absurdity, and rebellion. Support is available for travel and transporting materials.

Participatory Workshops

Workshops can take any format – making, moving, building, unlearning – and may take place indoors or out. They should engage participants in some form of collective imagination or world-remaking.

Speculative themes inspired by Graeber’s writings include:

• Reimagining value systems
• Bureaucratic absurdity and joyful disobedience
• Utopias-in-the-now
• Art as a tool of planetary repair

Workshops could involve map-making of vanished futures, rituals from climate-ravaged near-Earths, costume building, speculative currency design, or archive excavations from invented pasts.

Fashion Show Procession: “Costumes from Possible Futures”

We’re inviting models, artists, thinkers, and shapeshifters to co-create and wear speculative outfits that speak to other timelines.